The Obscurity Tax - Forgettable Marketing Actually Costs You
There's a tax you're paying every single day. It doesn't show up on any invoice. Your finance team has never flagged it. But it's bleeding your marketing budget dry, and it's probably the reason your CMO keeps getting uncomfortable questions in board meetings.
Call it the obscurity tax. It's what you pay for being forgettable. Unlike VAT, you can't claim it back.
What the Obscurity Tax Looks Like
Like a coworker with the moral compass from the 1970s, the obscurity tax doesn't announce itself, it creeps. It hides inside metrics you've learned to accept as normal, calling it seasonal fluctuations or misfired campaigns. It looks like:
Higher CPMs than competitors with similar audiences. Media platforms charge based on competition for attention. When your creative doesn't stop the scroll, you need more impressions to get the same result. You pay more for less.
Rising customer acquisition costs with no clear cause. Your CAC crept up 15% last year. The performance team blamed algorithm changes, increased competition, AI, and limited budgets. All true. But also: nobody remembers you, so every sale starts from zero.
Longer sales cycles than your product deserves. Your prospects need more touches, more meetings, more proof points. Yes, your product is complicated, but also they are having a hard time recalling where they’ve heard of you. Unless you’re pulling off an Ocean’s Eleven style heist, you don’t want to be forgettable.
Price sensitivity that shouldn't exist. You're competing on price against inferior products because buyers don't perceive anything else about you. Your brand doesn't command a premium because your brand doesn't exist in their minds.
Pipeline that evaporates between stages. You’ve published that gated white paper but within 15 business days all your leads go cold. Deals stall. Prospects ghost. Those who tried it liked your demo, but when it came time to make a decision, they went with the name they recognized. It felt safer because “everyone else is using them”.
This is the obscurity tax. And you're paying it every day, month, and quarter.
Fame compounds, but Shit does, too.
Here's what makes the obscurity tax particularly brutal: it compounds in the wrong direction.
When you're famous, fame builds on itself. Each impression reinforces memory. Each touchpoint strengthens associations and increases mental availability. The cost of the next customer goes down because the last campaign already did half the work.
When you're obscure, obscurity compounds too. Each forgettable message drills your audience to ignore you. Each generic campaign confirms that you're not worth remembering - you become part of the furniture, or rather a torrent of greyness that flows through the timeline, completely ignored. The cost of the next customer goes up because you're always starting over.
This is why mature brands can spend less on marketing as a percentage of revenue while growing faster than you. Sometimes they simply have more money, but more often it's that their brand works harder. Fame is doing the heavy lifting.
Meanwhile, you're on the treadmill. Running faster, sweating, and out of breath every quarter just to stay in place.
How to Calculate Your Obscurity Tax
The obscurity tax isn't theoretical. You can estimate it with data you already have.
Step 1: What the hell are those celebrities doing?
Find a competitor with strong brand awareness in your category. Compare your customer acquisition cost to theirs. The gap is a rough proxy for what obscurity is costing you per customer.
If they're spending €200 to acquire a customer and you're spending €350, that €150 difference—multiplied by your annual customer volume—is your obscurity tax.
Step 2: Measure your sales cycle against category benchmarks
How long does it take you to close a deal versus the category average? Every extra week in the sales cycle has a cost: sales team time, pipeline uncertainty, opportunities for competitors to swoop in.
If your sales cycle is 90 days and the category benchmark is 60 days, you're paying 50% more in sales resources per deal. That's the obscurity tax on your sales team.
Step 3: Audit your pricing power
Are you winning deals at full price, or are you discounting to close? Getting proof-of-concept deals that never go anywhere? What's your average discount rate compared to the market leader?
If you're discounting 20% on average while the category leader discounts 5%, that 15-point gap on every deal is the obscurity tax on your margins.
Step 4: Track your "no decision" rate.
How many qualified opportunities end in no decision? The prospect liked you, but ultimately didn't buy from anyone. Often this means they defaulted to the status quo—or to the brand they already knew.
A high no-decision rate is a symptom of insufficient fame. They didn't trust you enough to take the risk.
The Alternative to the Obscurity Tax
You have two options.
Option A: Keep paying the tax. Accept that you'll always spend more to acquire customers, wait longer to close them, and discount more to win them. Optimize your way to efficiency gains that get eaten by rising costs. Run faster on the treadmill.
Option B: Invest in fame. Build a brand that makes future marketing easier. Create advertising people actually remember. Generate the mental availability that means customers think of you first when they're ready to buy.
Option B costs money upfront. But unlike the obscurity tax, it compounds in your favor. Every dollar spent on fame reduces the cost of the next dollar. The investment pays back over years, not quarters.
Option A is the safe choice. It's also an expensive one.
The Math of Fame vs. Obscurity
Assume you're spending €1M annually on marketing. Your current CAC is €300. You acquire 3,333 customers per year.
Now assume investing 30% of that budget in brand building, fame-generating advertising, reduces your CAC by 20% over two years. (This is conservative; IPA data suggests well-executed brand campaigns can reduce CAC by 30-50% over time.)
Year one: You spend €700K on performance, €300K on brand. CAC drops to €270. You acquire 2,593 customers from performance, plus residual brand effect.
Year two: CAC drops to €240. Your €700K in performance spend now acquires 2,917 customers. And the brand investment keeps compounding.
By year three, you're acquiring more customers than you were in year one, at a lower CAC, with a more defensible market position.
The obscurity tax is expensive. Aiming for big "F" Fame is the only way to stop paying it.
What Fame Actually Requires
Fame isn't accidental. It's not a byproduct of good performance marketing. It requires deliberate investment in three things:
Reach. Fame requires that a significant portion of your target market sees your message. Not just the people actively searching for your solution—everyone who might buy someday. The 95% who aren't in-market today but will be eventually.
Memorability. Fame requires creative that sticks. Advertising that's distinctive enough to cut through, emotional enough to lodge in memory, consistent enough to build over time. Not another white-background product shot with a generic headline.
Consistency. Fame requires repetition. The same message, the same distinctive assets, the same brand world—reinforced across every touchpoint, over months and years. Fame isn't built in a quarter. It's built in a decade.
This is hard. It requires patience, which is scarce in quarterly reporting cycles. It requires courage, which is scarce in risk-averse organizations. It requires skill, which is scarce in agencies optimized for volume over quality.
But it's the only way out.
Stop Paying the Tax
Every day you're not famous, you're paying the obscurity tax. It's embedded in your CAC, your sales cycle, your pricing power, your win rate. It's the drag on your growth that nobody talks about because nobody knows how to name it.
Now you know. Want to do anything about it?
